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| Occupy Wall Street protests http://www.bbfans.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=52&t=42092 |
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| Author: | Madeline [ 13 Oct 11, 15:53 ] |
| Post subject: | Occupy Wall Street protests |
Former "Saturday Night Live" actress, conservative columnist and avowed enemy of both "Glee" and gay people, Victoria Jackson took a video camera to the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York City, predictably trying to inflame the supporters camped out in Zuccotti Park. Victoria Jackson Goes to "Occupy Wall Street" - Part 1 Youtube Tea party goes after Oocupy Wall Street www.politico.com |
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| Author: | Madeline [ 16 Oct 11, 15:05 ] |
| Post subject: | Re: Occupy Wall Street protests |
Across the world, the indignant rise up against corporate greed and cuts Violence mars Rome protest, but in scores more cities tens of thousands take peacefully to the streets By David Randall and Matt Thomas Protests against corporate greed, executive excess and public austerity began to gel into the beginnings of a worldwide movement yesterday as tens of thousands marched in scores of cities. The "Occupy Wall Street" protest, which started in Canada and spread to the US, and the long-running Spanish "Indignant" and Greek anti-cuts demonstrations coalesced on a day that saw marches or occupations in 82 countries. Some protests were small, as in Tokyo, where only 200 turned up; some were large, as in Spain, where around 60 separate demonstrations were staged; and some were muted, as in London, where nearly 2,000 intending to march on the Stock Exchange obeyed police who turned them back. As dusk fell, some 500 of them were kettled in St Paul's churchyard. Containment tactics were also used by police in New York last night as thousands of demonstrators were penned behind barricades in Times Square. They had marched through Manhattan and protested outside the city's banks, withdrawing their money as they did. Only one of the protests, in Rome, was violent. Here, among an estimated 100,000 protesters, were a few who broke away and hurled bottles, smashed shop windows, torched cars and attacked news crews. There were reports that the defence ministry had been partly trashed. Most of the disorder took place near the Colosseum, and police charged the protesters and fired water cannon. Some demonstrators fled, but others turned against the troublemakers, trying, with limited success, to stop them. Italy, with a national debt ratio second only to Greece's in the 17-nation eurozone, is rapidly becoming a focus of concern in Europe's debt crisis. But even in Germany – part of the solution to the crisis rather than the problem – around 4,000 people marched through the streets of Berlin with banners that urged the end of capitalism. Some scuffled with police as they tried to get near the country's parliamentary buildings. In Frankfurt, continental Europe's financial capital, some 5,000 people protested in front of the European Central Bank. In Spain, six marches were set to converge on Madrid's Puerta del Sol plaza just before dusk yesterday. This is the country where, in May, groups which became known as the Indignant Movement established the first around-the-clock protest camps that lasted for weeks in cities and towns. Portuguese angry at their government's handling of the economic crisis were due to protest in central Lisbon later yesterday evening. Portugal is one of three European nations – the others being Greece and Ireland – that have already needed an international bailout. In Stockholm, 500 people gathered to hear speakers denounce capitalism at a peaceful rally. They held up red flags and banners that read: "We are the 99 per cent" and "We refuse to pay for capitalism's crisis". The reference was to the world's richest 1 per cent, who control billions in assets, while billions around the world live in poverty or are struggling economically. Bilbo Goransson, a trade union activist, declared through a megaphone: "There are those who say the system is broke. It's not. That's how it was built. It is there to make rich people richer." Anti-banking protests outside St Paul's cathedral yesterday drew a crowd of around 2,000. The "Occupy London" protesters gathered with the intention of taking over the plaza in front of the London Stock Exchange but were turned back at Temple Bar by mounted police. The crowds returned to St Paul's churchyard where WikiLeaks' Julian Assange spoke briefly. The singer Billy Bragg was also in the crowd. "Today is about accountability," he said. "People want to see a change in the way things are done." He believed yesterday's protest represented a shift in the way the public views demonstrations. "I think the attitude coming out of protests here and on Wall Street has been incredibly positive," he said. "It's a desire to build, rather than smash things up." In Canada, hundreds gathered in Toronto's financial district to decry what they said was government-abetted corporate greed which has served elites at the expense of the majority. Further protests were planned yesterday for other Canadian cities, while, in the US, marches were scheduled in cities large and small, from Providence, Rhode Island, to Little Rock, Arkansas; from New York to Seattle. In the Bosnian city of Sarajevo, there was a different tone: hundreds walked through the streets carrying pictures of Che Guevara, old communist flags and placards that read: "Death to capitalism, freedom to the people". Turnout was light in Asia, where the global economy is booming. In Sydney, around 300 people gathered, cheering a speaker who shouted: "We're sick of corporate greed! Big banks, big corporate power standing over us and taking away our rights!" Only 200 people protested in Tokyo; and in the Philippines, about 100 people marched on the US embassy in Manila to express support for the Wall Street protests. A group of 100 prominent authors, including Salman Rushdie, Neil Gaiman and the Pulitzer prize-winning novelists Jennifer Egan and Michael Cunningham, signed an online petition declaring their support for "Occupy Wall Street and the Occupy Movement around the world". And there were stinging words yesterday in The New York Times' leading article for David Cameron and George Osborne. It began: "For now, Britain's economy has been stuck in a vicious cycle of low growth, high unemployment and fiscal austerity. But unlike Greece, which has been forced into induced recession by misguided European Union creditors, Britain has inflicted this harmful quack cure on itself." It ended: "Austerity is a political ideology masquerading as an economic policy. It rests on a myth, impervious to facts, that portrays all government spending as wasteful and harmful, and unnecessary to the recovery. The real world is a lot more complicated. America has no need to repeat Mr Cameron's failed experiment." Several years after the Western financial crisis began, and with growing momentum it seems, new dividing lines – if not battle lines – are being drawn up. Independent |
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| Author: | Madeline [ 20 Oct 11, 13:59 ] |
| Post subject: | Re: Occupy Wall Street protests |
Occupy movement attracts support of top authors Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie and Noam Chomsky among star names added to online petition at As anti-capitalism protests spread around the world, a growing group of almost 1,200 authors including Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie and Neil Gaiman has publicly announced its support for the Occupy movement. An online petition at occupywriters.com.com declaring the writers' backing for Occupy Wall Street and its sister movements in other countries, which have seen thousands of protesters marching against the global financial system, has been signed by 1,190 authors and counting, including the Pulitzer prize winners Jennifer Egan and Michael Cunningham as well as Alice Walker, Naomi Klein, Naomi Wolf, Jonathan Lethem, Ann Patchett, Noam Chomsky, AL Kennedy, Ursula K Le Guin and Donna Tartt. "We, the undersigned writers and all who will join us, support Occupy Wall Street and the Occupy movement around the world," says the petition. Author Jeff Sharlet and journalist Kiera Feldman created the website after Rushdie offered his support via Twitter. Sharlet said the site was already "stunningly busy", with more than 100,000 visitors a day and a backlog of 1,000 writers to be vetted, "just to make sure they're real people". The supporting writers are now starting to contribute "occupy writings" for the website, with Walker, winner of the Pulitzer for her novel The Color Purple, writing a poem, "The World We Want Is Us". "Yes, we are the 99% / all of us / refusing to forget / each other / no matter, in our hunger, what crumbs / are dropped by / the 1%," she writes. American author Francine Prose, in her contribution, explains how "since this movement started, I've been waking up in the morning without the dread (or at least without the total dread) with which I've woken every morning for so long, the vertiginous sense that we're all falling off a cliff and no one (or almost no one) is saying anything about it". "In Zuccotti Park I felt a kind of lightening of a weight, a lessening of the awful isolation and powerlessness of knowing we're being lied to and robbed on a daily basis and that everyone knows it and keeps quiet and endures it; the terror of thinking that my own grandchildren will suffer for whatever has been paralysing us until just now," she writes. "I kept feeling these intense surges of emotion – until I saw a placard with a quote from Walt Whitman's Song of Myself: 'I am large, I contain multitudes.' And that was when I just lost it and stood there and wept." Guardian |
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| Author: | Madeline [ 20 Oct 11, 14:08 ] |
| Post subject: | Re: Occupy Wall Street protests |
Naomi Wolf: how I was arrested at Occupy Wall Street Arresting a middle-aged writer in an evening gown for peaceable conduct is a far cry from when America was a free republic Guardian |
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| Author: | Madeline [ 20 Oct 11, 15:03 ] |
| Post subject: | Re: Occupy Wall Street protests |
Russell Brand visits Wall Street protests Sun |
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| Author: | Madeline [ 25 Oct 11, 21:40 ] |
| Post subject: | Re: Occupy Wall Street protests |
DC Douglas' "Why #OccupyWallStreet? 4 Reasons." |
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| Author: | Madeline [ 03 Nov 11, 12:55 ] |
| Post subject: | Re: Occupy Wall Street protests |
Adam Boulton from Sky News comparing the OccupyLSX protesters to the Nazi occupation of France. Youtube |
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| Author: | Madeline [ 06 Nov 11, 16:25 ] |
| Post subject: | Re: Occupy Wall Street protests |
How to Occupy the moral and political high ground The worldwide protest can be a critical force for change if it follows some simple rules Guardian |
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| Author: | Madeline [ 10 Nov 11, 11:52 ] |
| Post subject: | Re: Occupy Wall Street protests |
Stephen King Offers To Help Struggling Maine Residents Stay Warm This Winter Stephen King Offers Heating Aid BANGOR, Maine -- Horror author Stephen King is stepping up to help struggling Maine residents buy heating oil. The state is facing deep cuts to a federal heating oil assistance program. The Maine native announced Tuesday that his foundation will work with the three radio stations he owns in the Bangor area to raise $140,000 to buy heating oil for low-income residents. He's asking listeners to donate $70,000, and the foundation will double it. The federal government told the Maine State Housing Authority that it should expect to receive $23 million in heating oil assistance this winter, down from $55.6 million last winter. Huffington post |
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| Author: | Madeline [ 19 Nov 11, 16:19 ] |
| Post subject: | Re: Occupy Wall Street protests |
Jesus may be with Occupy London, but St Paul would have sided with health and safety The cathedral's namesake was a sucker for authority – as the church is and ever was Marina Hyde Guardian 'For St Paul, established authority took precedence over even moral authority.' 'I could imagine Jesus being born in the camp," mused Giles Fraser, the departing canon chancellor of St Paul's who so rebelliously made the church relevant this week. For my part, I could imagine St Paul siding with health and safety. Forgive the lapse into theological technicalese, especially from a pagan such as myself, but the cathedral's namesake was a bit of an arse. For St Paul, established authority took precedence over even moral authority. The New Testament reverentially preserves a letter in which our hero writes that he is sending a runaway slave back to his master, specifically violating an Old Testament command. "Thou shalt not deliver unto his master the servant which is escaped from his master unto thee," runs the relevant passage in Deuteronomy. "He shall dwell with thee, even among you, in that place which he shall choose in one of thy gates, where it liketh him best: thou shalt not oppress him." So, after a week in which the instinctively malign bumblings of British authority yet again had the flavour of a debased Ealing comedy, Rev Fraser's principled departure brought a sense of clarity. Friday's summoning of the lawyers by St Paul's merely underscored it. We now know that Giles's erstwhile colleagues do not want those who perceive themselves the slaves of capitalism dwelling where it liketh them in the church's gate. They would liketh the protesters to "move on", in fact – even though it seems likely to lead to ugly scenes and possibly violence – and allow them to resume the softly-softly behind-the-scenes work in fighting injustice and selling £180 cufflinks which has done such a bang-up job of making the victims of their City neighbours feel empowered. At some level you have to admire the church's absolute insistence on ineffectuality. Speaking of which, what a nostalgic pleasure it was to see the former archbishop of Canterbury George Carey wheel himself on to the Telegraph comment pages to dispense a column that would be absurdly flattered by the description of useful idiocy. "How could Occupy be unaware?" wondered His Pointmissingness, of all the work the church was doing to promote justice. "The St Paul's Institute alone has been raising precisely the issues Occupy is raising." How on earth did they miss that? It feels the moment to reprise the old rumour of how George Carey landed the big job. Legend has it that the Anglican establishment's wildly preferred candidate was John Habgood, the hugely intelligent Archbishop of York. Fearing Habgood was too much of a lefty for Margaret Thatcher to anoint, the bishops hatched a plot: the only alternative they would submit would be a candidate of such transparent uselessness that she could only give the job to Habgood. I need hardly tell you how that one turned out. Needless to say, Lord Carey bought the police line about their thermal imaging cameras having revealed the tents to have been mostly empty. I was always less convinced, given that the Telegraph's thermal imaging video showed a man walking behind a tent only for the red glow of his leg to promptly disappear. Perhaps it was coated in some fiendishly clever anti-thermal formula. But this week's apparent debunking of the footage – protesters hired their own thermal camera and found full tents showed up empty – suggests the contraption was set to a heat sensitivity that would not even have detected the presence in a tent of a McDonald's apple pie (widely held to be the hottest thing in the universe, bar the centre of the sun). Still, we must once again salute the Metropolitan police, who have brought out the CTU-style hardware to investigate the contents of a few tents, but never even bothered to open the sacks of evidence of the News of the World's industrial phone hacking that sat gathering dust in their own offices. The force's first priority is to provide self-regarding footage for Police Camera Action, so let's hope this means the Christmas bloopers special is now a wrap. The church, meanwhile, has missed a sensational trick. Namely, the chance to hold out against the opaque Corporation of London and allow a space where an alternative view of the world could be presented. Call it Passport to St Paul's, inspired by the classic Ealing comedy Passport to Pimlico, in which the south London district secedes from British jurisdiction, sparking a few heady summer days of rationing-free existence and other unconventional capers. A way is found to finesse them back into the fold, of course – but everyone has learned something, and the operative word is "finesse". Not "order". Instead, we have closing ranks and the likes of Carey, who noted stuffily that Giles Fraser resigned "via the predictable medium of Twitter". "My paramount concern throughout," Carey revealed, "has been that the reputation of Christianity is being damaged by the episode." But of course it has. And you know, we might deem this blinkered obsession with "the brand" far more distastefully modern than Fraser's use of social media – were it not a self-interested survival strategy almost as old as the church itself. • This story was amended on 4 November 2011 to remove an incorrect reference to the protesters having hired the same camera as that used by the Telegraph. |
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| Author: | Madeline [ 24 Dec 12, 10:36 ] |
| Post subject: | Re: Occupy Wall Street protests |
FBI Investigated 'Occupy' As Possible 'Terrorism' Threat, Internal Documents Show www.huffingtonpost.com |
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